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Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The first was a sprue of Mantic Ghouls sent courtesy of Wayland games. For a while at least, they had a program where by you registered for their newsletter, and then they sent you a sprue of Ghouls. I registered some time in April, and was not expecting to get them anymore. Most interestingly, the packet was post marked April 27th, so it took nearly 7 months to get here.

Here is a picture of the sprue, and another with a standard 2nd edition Space Marine (which, considering how long ago 2nd edition was in print, might not be considered standard any more!). These are the first Mantic figures I have seen in person, and they seem quite nice. I could certainly see getting a few more sprues of these to use for a variety of purposes; however, they seem somewhat limited in that they have only three heads for two torsos.

The second was the flyer that I mentioned in the last post, which Tony of Dampf's Modeling page kindly sent to me. Opening that packet was a thrill. My wife and I paged through it together, and she said "They used to have so many games". So true. GW went from having, and promoting, ten games, to just the three "main" games of today. Just looking at the wackiness that used to be part of the hobby makes one feel sad for the blander current games (which to be fair also have better sculpted figures and more complete ranges).

Front cover:

Back Cover:40k pages:

Ah, look at all that red.

In other hobby news, I managed to put brush to a figure for the first time in many months, and also started thinking about getting going on the Baneblade again... we will see how that works out.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

When I was but a lad, I somehow convinced my dad to take me around to all the hobby shops in town. We had an enjoyable afternoon driving around from one shop to the next, looking at models, rockets, and miniatures The last shop we visited was Viking Hobby, which was jam packed with models, miniatures, and board based wargames.

After browsing around the store a bit, I came across something which would change me forever, a Games Workshop flyer which had information about all of their games and miniatures (they then had many more games than currently). I did not buy anything, but I did leave the shop with that flyer, which I poured over for hours and hours, studying every picture, and dreaming of grand battles between Eldar and Space Marines, two things I did not even know about previously.

I later hesitantly showed it to my friend, and to my surprise he immediately pulled out a shoebox full of Squats! (then a major part of the emerging Warhammer 40k universe). Right then and there we had a bit of a battle with his squats (partly painted with enamel paint). He wanted to review the flier, and I left it there, and never saw it again (I suspect his mom threw it out). We never played with his figures again, but did have a continuing series of battles with armies made from Legos, adjudicated by simple rules based on his recollection of 40k.

Now, many (many) years later, Tony, of Dampf's Modelling Page, was having a bit of a rummage through his various GW flyers, and decided to clear them out. During a bit of discussion, I mentioned my experience with the flyer, and today he posted this post, the first item of which has what appears to be the flyer in question! Just look at that cover in all of its early 90s glory! Back banners, red and yellow on everything, and green edged flocked bases.

Love it. I think I am going to be looking at that cover all day now...